Cerebral Valley – Week of February 17th 🗓

The latest in AI Products, Events, and Jobs

February 17, 2025

Launching an AI product? Hiring? Fundraising? Get in touch!

You Might’ve Missed


🗓️ Friday, February 21st
📍 New York, NY

Agents are cool, but they'll never feel the joys of human connection.

Come by the post conference happy hour to decompress and enjoy some convos and bevs.

Free drinks, great people, and good vibes.

This event is hosted in partnership with M13 and GenAI Collective.

Spotlight: Self-Hosted Convex (Open Source, Built for Developers)

Convex is an open-source, reactive database where queries are TypeScript code running right in the database. As React components react to state changes, Convex queries react to database changes—giving developers a powerful, real-time backend without the usual complexity.

Now, self-hosted Convex gives you complete control over your infrastructure while keeping the same developer-friendly experience.

With self-hosted Convex, you have full control over your backend—run it wherever you need, customize it to fit your stack, and build with the same real-time, reactive experience that makes Convex powerful.

Self-hosting Convex lets you:

  • Deploy anywhere – Run Convex with Docker, deploy to Fly.io, and integrate with Postgres or MySQL to fit your infrastructure.

  • Develop locally – Start a fully functional local instance with npx convex dev, even without an internet connection

  • Stay in control – The Convex dashboard is now open-source, and you can configure authentication, storage, and compute the way you need.

Check out the repo to get started.

Events List

A curated list of upcoming AI events (view all events).

Featured Events:

🗓️ Tuesday, February 18th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​​Join us for an exciting evening of insights, networking, and innovation as we explore the cutting-edge world of data infrastructure, graph databases, integration systems, and machine learning! Whether you're a founder, engineer, executive, or innovator, this event is designed for those who are passionate about the future of AI and the data that drives it.

We're excited to bring you an amazing roster of speakers, with fantastic teams working on cutting edge technology in Data & AI.

🗓️ Tuesday, February 18th
📍 Santa Clara, CA

If you’re building or scaling AI-driven applications, this talk is for you. Learn how agentic workflows enable autonomous state management, seamless scaling, and customizable workflows to deploy production-ready AI applications with confidence and speed.

You have two options to attend: in person in Santa Clara on February 12th or join virtually on February 19th. Claim your free pass by registering here-- and if you'd like a deeper dive into how Inngest can help your team, book a demo directly with Inngest CEO, Tony Holdstock-Brown to see it in action!

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Register

🗓️ Wednesday, February 19th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​Join Us for the Agent AI Hack Night!

​Get ready for an exciting evening of hacking, networking, and innovation! Hosted by Weaviate and VESSL AI, this event is all about exploring the potential of AI agents and creating impactful solutions alongside fellow developers. We're bringing together incredible companies including FireworksAI and CrewAI.

​With cutting-edge models like DeepSeek R1 and DeepSeek V3 now more accessible than ever, this is a great opportunity to experiment, build, and optimize your AI workflows. Fireworks AI is offering free credits ($20) to help you get started—so you can dive in and bring your AI agent ideas to life.

🗓️ Friday, February 21st
📍 San Francisco, CA

A night of engineering Trivia, like a traditional trivia night but for engineers by engineers. Sponsored by OpenAI, LaunchDarkly, SignalFire and more! Come win incredible prizes (early access to coveted AI models?) meet investors and hang out with other bay area developers.

​This is not another lame networking event! Join Jarod and Lizzie as they aim to create a twisted night of trivia and engineering showmanship. It's a friday, so we are looking to kickoff the weekend with a bang.

​Teams will compete to answer questions spanning tech, startups, open source, and general knowledge—all while enjoying drinks, snacks, and good company.

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Register

🗓️ Friday, February 21st
📍 San Francisco, CA

STRONG COMPUTE GPU HACKATHON

​For Engineers & AI Researchers who are comfortable with PyTorch.

​Our goal is to offer the best platform to build and train models at cluster scale. Come on over, light up some clusters, have a blast and let us know what you love and what needs work. 

​​Strong Compute’s Instant Super Computer (ISC) is designed to be the easiest way to get started on multinode training. You’ll be up and running in an hour.

​Engineers only. All code. Recruiters/Slidegineers/Marketers etc. need not apply.

​All applicants will be vetted for technical fit before being approved to attend.

​Choose from one of the following hacks to compete in over the weekend.

​Competition A: DEEPSEEK Fine Tuning

​DeepSeek has landed. Come build the next demonstration of leaner meaner reasoning models dominating the big guys.

​Strong Compute will provide the DeepSeek distillation model weights at your fingertips, and a bunch of GPUs to fine tune on. Over to you!

​Fine-tune a DeepSeek reasoning model on your dataset and show us what it can do. The most impressive demo wins.

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Register

🗓️ Saturday, February 22nd
📍 San Francisco, CA

We’re excited to welcome you to the ElevenLabs Worldwide Hackathon — San Francisco
Judges: to be announced!

Partners include Loveable, Clerk and many more.

Participants will use partner tooling and models with the goal of building AI Agents Winning teams will receive prizes and credits to kickstart their projects.

Prizes include: - 4x M4 Mac Mini; - 4x Teenage Engineering OB-4, - 4x Shure Microphones

Note: This is a fully in person event, remote teams are not allowed. For full details of the event and other locations go to hackathon.elevenlabs.io

🗓️ Thursday, February 27th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​This unique event gives AI practitioners and early stage startup teams the chance to work side by side with supply chain and procurement professionals to help develop tools and strategies for addressing supply chain disruptions caused by extreme weather. With a panel of expert judges from industry, policymakers and nonprofits, the AI Supply Chain Hackathon is a terrific opportunity for people excited and concerned about the impact of AI on accelerating both supply chain decisions and supply chain disruptions.

Sign up for free to get more info.

Our panel of expert AI Supply Chain Hackathon judges include:

  • Marc Carlson, Chief Revenue Officer - Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Perdue

  • Charlotte De Brabandt, ex-JJ & Amazon, supply chain thought leader

  • Ben Roome, PhD, Founder - Ethical Resolve

And many others, with more to be announced!

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Register

🗓️ Thursday, February 27th
📍 San Francisco, CA

​​We’re back for the first AI Code Gen + Full-Stack Demo Night at Convex.

​This is an in-person event!
Registration is required to get in.

​Topic: Using AI Code Gen Applications and full-stack app development.

​What we'll do:
Hear three talks on the latest advancements in AI Code Gen and full-stack development.
Enjoy food, refreshments, and plenty of time to chat and network about AI and full-stack development after the tech talks.

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Register

🗓️ Thursday, March 6th
📍 Other

At Nebius, we’re creating an AI Cloud — a cutting-edge cloud platform designed exclusively for AI practitioners. It provides seamless AI solutions accelerated by NVIDIA, popular MLOps tools and a scalable inference platform to support AI application development.

Ready to meet the team behind it all?

Join us at Station F, Paris, on Thursday 6 March, for an exclusive look into Nebius AI Neocloud, our cutting-edge platform designed for explorers and innovators.

Whether you’re developing AI models, scaling ML workloads or deploying AI applications, this is a great opportunity to connect with our developers, product experts, architects and the NVIDIA team.

What’s in store?

  • An insider’s look at Nebius architecture and development principles.

  • Insights into NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture.

  • A deep dive into how we developed a Kubernetes operator for Slurm.

  • Discover how test-time computation unlocks the potential of agentic systems.

And much more!

Plus, all attendees will receive free credits to try out our GPU Cloud Accelerated by NVIDIA and explore the new text-to-image functionality in AI Studio.

Spaces are limited, so don’t miss out! Register now to secure your spot.

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Register

🗓️ Wednesday, March 19th
📍 San Francisco, CA

We booked the Alamo Drafthouse for a private screening of the movie Her. If you are working in AI, let's watch and rediscover one of Spike Jonze's masterpieces. In times of deep coping and major shock, we want to get inspired and get to know more builders that can see beyond the AGI/ASI hype.

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Register

Planning an upcoming event? Submit an event to our AI Event Feature.

Final Note…

You’ve reached the end of our weekly Cerebral Valley newsletter.

Sponsors: If you would like to promote a launch, event or hiring call to our community of AI founders, enterprises and investors, please get in touch at [email protected] or DM us on X.